by Jo Verity
‘I expect he’s got a couple. Most people do. It’s a way of filtering stuff.’ Neil signed out and got up from the desk. ‘I’d better go and unpack a few things.’
Jack tidied the kitchen, trying to recall every precious word of Kingsley’s mail. How literally should he interpret the phrase ‘nomadic life’? Was his son on ‘walkabout’? To be truthful, there was nothing to indicate that he was still in Australia. He could be in Cornwall with a group of New Age Travellers for all they knew. But, if that were the case, even a bitter, angry Kingsley could not be so cruel as to stay away.
Jack put the crockery and cutlery away and scrubbed the worktops, obliterating every smear of grease, every splash of tea, until the kitchen looked like an operating theatre. ‘Tell Mum and Dad not to fret.’ Fret. Did the boy have no idea that his absence dominated their lives, like a smoking bomb crater?
He and Neil were having a coffee, in the garden, when Fay arrived home. Her presence seemed to fluster Neil. Not surprising, really. Jack imagined he would have felt the same if, when he was twenty-three, he’d gone to lodge with Mrs. Watkins – his dishy ex-geography teacher. While Fay was saying something about going out for breakfast and not listening to a word he was saying, he took the opportunity to tell her about the additional dance fixture. When he decamped to Llangwm for a couple of days, three weeks hence, he would, quite truthfully, be able to say that he’d warned her. And Neil could act as witness for the defence.
After Fay had unpacked, they sat in the living room, Jack trying to identify the muffled music, no more than a bass beat, coming from upstairs. Dylan had lived at home until six months ago but he hadn’t been terribly interested in music. He’d had a player in his room, but that was probably more because it was expected of him than to feed a hunger, whereas Kingsley would wilt if he were cut off from his source of musical supply for more than an hour or two.
‘Have I missed anything? Is there any news?’ Fay asked.
There was news. Neil’s email correspondence with Kingsley was big news. And the disclosure that their son was on the move again was news. Jack looked up from the paper and cocked his head to one side, as though delving into his memory. ‘Don’t think so. No.’ He wasn’t ready to share it with her yet, in case she waded in and did something to frighten Kingsley off.
‘Your parents are okay?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘But you went there on Thursday, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes. They were fine on Thursday.’ As Jack, on his way to Llangwm, had driven past the turn to their house, he had made a mental note to check that they were okay but it had slipped his mind. He must be more careful in future.
As soon as he could, under the pretext of running through his diary for the coming week, he slipped into the study and dialled their number, letting the phone ring longer than they could possibly take to reach it from anywhere in their tiny house. Five o’clock on a Saturday. They should be at home. He had a sudden but intense hunch that something was wrong. If he’d thought about it this morning, he would have had time to pay them a quick visit but now, aware of the fragility of his alibi, it preyed on his mind and, while Fay wittered on, he ran through it, coming to the conclusion that, if anything were amiss, he would have heard about it by now.
‘So, shall we call Neil down?’ Fay asked. ‘The sooner we let him know how we see this going, the better.’
‘Poor kid. We don’t want him to feel that he’s here under sufferance.’
Fay shook her head. ‘I wish you’d make your mind up. You were the one who raised the “house rules” issue.’
Jack went in search of their lodger but the music had stopped and there was no response to his knock on the bedroom door. There was, however, a note, in small, neat writing, propped up against the vase of flowers on the kitchen table.
Just off out. Will try not to wake you when I come back. Thanks for everything. N.
Jack tried his parents several times during the evening. Eventually, at about ten o’clock, his mother answered. When he asked where they’d been, she explained that they’d been at home. ‘Dad wouldn’t let me answer. He’s not feeling too bright but he didn’t want you to know, so as you wouldn’t worry. I knew it was you ringing all the time, though. I did that one-four-seven-one thing you told me about.’
‘What’s the matter with him, Mum?’ It wasn’t the moment to criticise their half-baked reasoning. ‘What are the symptoms?’
She explained that Harry hadn’t been ‘too bright’ for a couple of days. ‘Nothing drastic, just a bit more breathless than usual. A bit dizzy, like, and off his food.’
‘What does the doctor say?’ He knew the answer before he asked.
‘We didn’t want to bother him. You know your dad doesn’t like to make a fuss.’
‘That’ll look great on his tombstone, won’t it? “Harry Waterfield – the man who didn’t like to make a fuss”.’ There was silence and he was ashamed of his cruel jibe. ‘I’ll pop up now. No arguments. I’ll be with you in half an hour.’
‘I’ll have the kettle on,’ was all she said.
Fay offered to go with him, but she was the last person his mother would want around if they were in trouble, and he persuaded her that it would be more useful if she stayed at home, ‘We might need you here to…coordinate things.’ They both knew that this was nonsense but it was the let-out she needed.
He packed his pyjamas, a change of clothes for the next day and the remains of the Christmas brandy. ‘One of us might need it,’ he explained when Fay raised her eyebrows.
‘Don’t you think you should phone Marion? You know how funny she can be if she thinks she’s being left out.’
‘I’ll wait until I get the lie of the land. There’s no point in worrying her unnecessarily…’ he trailed off and gave a sheepish grin. ‘I’m as bad as they are.’
Fay kissed him gently and, he thought, lovingly. ‘Let me know how he is.’
As he started the car, he imagined how it might appear to a nosey neighbour. Eleven o’clock, overnight bag in hand, he kisses his wife and drives away. Shortly after a young man arrives and lets himself in. That should keep them guessing.
It was the time when restaurants and pubs shut and there was a fair volume of traffic heading out of Cardiff. Jack drove more slowly than usual, reluctant to reach his destination, spinning out the precious moments before he got tangled up in whatever was unfolding in the little terraced house.
22
Jack followed his mother through to the back room, where Harry was lying across the sofa, propped up on a pillow, wedged against the arm. From what Jack could see, his only concession to his ‘not too bright’-ness was to have exchanged his trousers for pyjama bottoms. How small his father seemed, compressed on to the two-seater sofa; how invalid-like. This was partly due to his grey face and sunken cheeks but the impression was emphasised by the ever-present coffee table, dragged to within arm’s reach, littered with the comforts of the sick room – the bottle of lemonade, the box of tissues, the bag of mint imperials and another of boiled sweets and the plastic bucket discreetly placed on the floor, between its splayed legs.
‘Fuss about nothing,’ he greeted his son.
‘Probably.’ Jack touched the back of his hand to his father’s forehead, not because he had a clue what it might indicate, but because his mother would find it reassuring. ‘Perhaps it would be a good idea to get you checked out. Put Mum’s mind at rest.’ He turned to her for confirmation and she nodded gratefully.
‘I’ll take it easy… tomorrow, then pop… down the surgery on… Monday.’ Harry gasped his way through the promise. His chest had always been his weak point but tonight it sounded worse than Jack had ever heard it.
‘Show John your ankles, Dad.’
His father made a feeble attempt to reach his right ankle but gave up and fell back against the pillow. Jack pulled up the pyjama leg and rolled down the nylon sock. Harry’s leg ran straight down from the calf through to the foot
without narrowing. The top of his foot was puffed up and there were indentations in the flesh where the elasticated sock had cut in. The other leg was the same.
‘You’d be more comfortable in bed, Dad. Let’s see if we can get you upstairs.’
But, even with both of them to lean on, Harry could barely shuffle to the door and his breathing sounded more distressed, his chest whistling and gurgling as he gasped for air. Jack recognised how disastrous it would be to get stuck half way up the stairs and they guided him back to the sofa.
‘I’m going to phone the doctor.’ Jack ignored his father’s protestations. Out in the hall, Vi indicated the printed sheet on the telephone table ‘What to do in case of a medical emergency out of surgery hours’. He scanned through the instructions which appeared to forbid anyone to be ill after six pm or at weekends. No wonder his father would rather die than call the doctor. He went through the designated procedure, answering the same questions several times as his call was bounced from one disinterested voice to the next. Eventually he did what Fay would have made him do right from the start, and played the I’m-a-dentist-so-I-know-a-bit-about-it card. ‘I’ve examined my father thoroughly and he needs to see a doctor. Now.’
Doctor Mansel, whom neither Vi nor Harry had seen before and whom Jack doubted was as old as Dylan, arrived about an hour later. ‘I’d like to get you checked over, Mr Waterfield. Just to be on the safe side.’ He was unconvincingly casual, but Harry played along with it and Jack sensed that his father was grateful to have the decision taken out of his hands. Even in these unhappy circumstances, Vi shone with pride at her son’s authority, bustling about making cups of tea, while the doctor located a hospital bed for Harry.
Jack thought back a few hours, to when he and Fay had been cocooned in the safety of the sitting room. Even now, people all over the city – all over the world – were ignorant of what was waiting to come crashing in on their lives. Flood, fire, death, destruction. And it was inevitable that, whatever the hospital tests showed, the Waterfield family’s cosy existence was about to lurch out of kilter, maybe for a short while or maybe forever.
‘I’m going to make a couple of calls.’ Jack went into the hall, glad to escape for a moment. First he rang Fay and updated her on what was happening. ‘I shouldn’t think I’ll be home until we’ve got him settled somewhere,’ he paused, ‘And I’ll probably have to bring Mum with me. I’ll keep you posted.’
Next he phoned his sister. It wasn’t a number that he knew by heart and he leafed through his parents’ leather-bound address book. ‘John and Fay Waterfield’ and ‘Marion and Richard Wells’. It shocked him to see that his mother had entered the names and addresses of her children so formally, in her neat, laboured handwriting. It was as if they were acquaintances, no more significant than the plumber or the couple they met last year on the ‘turkey-and-tinsel’ trip to Weymouth.
He dialled Marion’s number. It rang seven or eight times before the answering machine cut in. He put the phone down and glanced at his watch. One o’clock. She and Richard would be in bed, ignoring the call. He rang twice more until his sister, terse and full of sleep, answered and he gave her a brief account of the situation, adding, ‘There’s no point in coming at the moment but I thought you’d want to know what was going on.’
Marion showed no emotion at his news, but she’d never been demonstrative and he left it at that, promising to ring again when he had more details.
The journey through the empty streets, following the ambulance that Kyle – they were now on first name terms with Doctor Mansel – had insisted on summoning, took about three quarters of an hour. The blacked-out windows in the rear door gave no clue as to what was going on inside, but Jack was encouraged to note that the vehicle was progressing at a steady pace, without wailing siren or whirling blue light. Now and then he shot a glance at his mother in the passenger seat. Her hands gripped the mock-leather holdall in which she’d packed Harry’s pyjamas and toiletries and she stared ahead, as though her unremitting gaze could keep her husband safe.
He searched for words of reassurance. ‘He’s in good hands, Mum. They’ll get him sorted out.’ What he really wanted to ask was, ‘How did it get to this stage?’, but it might have had something to do with his failure to visit them on Thursday, and that was the last thing he wanted to hear.
The rest of the night was spent in the twilight zone of the Emergency Admissions Department; in stale-smelling unventilated rooms lit by fluorescent strip lights; in cubicles and side rooms, sitting on plastic chairs, drinking tepid drinks dispensed from a machine. Jack was sure that Limbo must be somewhere in the bowels of a city hospital during the night shift.
They stuck as close as they could to Harry as he was taken for blood tests and X-rays. He looked embarrassed to be on display, half-sitting, half-lying on the battered trolley, waiting for whatever might come next. They made small-talk until they ran out of cheerful clichés and Harry drifted into half-sleep. At about five o’clock, two burly porters took him up to the ward. The nurse supervising the process took the holdall, which Vi had been clutching since they left the house, suggesting, although it was clearly an instruction, ‘Why don’t you pop home? Have a nap and a bite to eat. We’ll have him ready for visitors by two o’clock.’ In those few hours his father had gone from being an independent man to an invalid, who needed to be prepared for visitors.
Fay watched the car pull away, relieved that, for once, Jack was the one having to deal with whatever this might turn out to be – crisis or false alarm. Without thinking, she slipped the chain on the front door then took it off again. Neil wasn’t back, was he? It was so different when the person who hadn’t come home yet was another mother’s child. He was a nice enough young man but she wasn’t obliged to lie awake all night, dreading that he’d been beaten up, or worse.
She went to bed and tried to read. At about midnight she heard the sound of the front door shutting gently, followed by soft footfalls on the stair. Neil or Jack? The footsteps passed her door. Neil.
She was asleep when Jack phoned. He sounded calm but she knew that his brain must already be wrestling with the implications of Harry’s impending hospitalisation. The immediate problem would be what to do with Vi. Marion lived in Swansea and had a prestigious job with one of the big building societies. She was an unfathomable woman, without an iota of tenderness. When Marion’s only son had been born, Fay had visited her in the maternity unit, and as the other mothers cooed over new babies and revelled in those few brief days when they were considered special, Marion read a book. There was no chance that she would drop everything to come and support her mother. No. It would fall to Jack. He lived near the hospital, had a spare bedroom and was too soft to refuse.
She went downstairs and made a pot of camomile tea, hoping that it would help her sleep. Tomorrow, or rather today, was the last day of the long holiday. She should be feeling relaxed and brimming with energy, ready to tackle the coming academic year, but instead she was feeling cross. Cross that they hadn’t had a decent holiday. They’d gone away for a few days after the wedding but Paris was hardly the place to unwind and, for some reason, Jack had been irritatingly over attentive. Cross because she’d allowed herself to become infatuated with Cassidy. And crosser still that he could maintain his hold over her at the same time as making overtures to Caitlin.
Now Harry was doing his level best to disrupt her life. At least her own father had had the decency to drop dead whilst he was still in perfect health. In any case, her mother was an educated woman, accustomed to sorting out her own affairs. Fay doubted whether Vi had ever changed a plug, booked a holiday or spoken to the bank manager. The only time the Waterfields had been apart was when Harry was at work, and then it was as if Vi were holding her breath until he came home again. He’d finished work years ago and if anything happened to him, she would become dependent on Jack. How could anyone be so pathetic yet, at the same time, so controlling?
The camomile tea was failing to make her drows
y, and she flicked through the pages of the local paper. God, the stories were parochial – another cat rescued from a chimney; another barmaid shaving her head for a good cause; another petition against the closure of a branch library. She skimmed through the ‘Situations Vacant’ pages, on the off-chance that there might be something suitable for Neil. If he were offered a job next week, it was unlikely that he would start straight away and then it would be another month before he had his first pay check. Neil would be with them for a couple of months, if all went well, and goodness knows how long if it didn’t.
The lavatory flush hissed. If Neil was still awake, he might as well keep her company. She called him down. ‘I thought you might be wondering why the phone was ringing.’ From his befuddled expression, it was clear that he hadn’t heard a thing but he was evidently eager not to contradict his landlady and Fay continued, ‘Jack’s father’s been rushed to hospital. Something to do with his breathing.’
Neil stifled a yawn. ‘Sorry to hear that. He seems a nice old guy.’
It had slipped Fay’s mind that Neil had met Jack’s parents at the barbecue. And Harry was a ‘nice old guy’. It was Vi that was the difficulty.
Before meeting them, she’d assumed that Jack’s parents were working-class but well-educated. She’d imagined they came from the same Welsh stable as Aneurin Bevan or Elizabeth Andrews and it had disappointed, even shocked her, to discover that Jack’s mother was so…so uncultivated. She wasn’t proud of her reaction and had always told herself that, had Vi been a hilarious, optimistic, feisty woman, her shortcomings wouldn’t have mattered. She could understand why Vi had been standoffish in the beginning – her son, her golden boy, had brought home a girlfriend whom she considered to be hoity-toity and ‘posh English’ – and it was obvious that Vi thought that Fay, in her attempts to dispel this impression, was playing Lady Bountiful. Maybe there had been a grain of truth in that. Then, when the children were born, Vi was constantly watching, assessing how good she was at putting on a nappy or getting wind up; silently criticising her decision to return to work or – Jack was never to blame – her choice of school; judging without offering assistance; bullying by aggressive meekness.